Sport

When the sonorous voice of Clive Myrie describes something as the ‘biggest sports story of the century’ in tones normally used for events in Kyiv or Gaza it’s probably time to sit up and listen. Or maybe not. The City saga – at root claiming that the club breached financial rules to pay its way from 2009 to 2018, when they won the Premier League three times – has been going on for eight years after all, and if Ferran Soriano, the chief executive, and the unfeasibly wealthy chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, know what they are talking about, it’s got plenty more time to run. God help us! And they do seem pretty bullish. None of this, ‘OK guv, you got us bang to rights, we’ll come quietly’ stuff. Personally, I find it difficult to get worked up about this story.

As Spectator readers will surely be aware, many of the stories we read in the papers nowadays are there not because they’re important, entertaining, moving or amusing, but because they’re the kind – about weight loss, true crime, celebrity and so on – that get the most ‘clicks’ from online readers. And clicks mean advertising. It’s the same in sport reporting: football is endlessly popular even when it’s quite dreary (and I mean you, ‘international break’); athletics much less so. Just doesn’t get the clicks, you see, even when it’s the most thrilling spectacle around – like the World Ultimate Championship in Budapest at the weekend.

Bad education Sir: Lara Brown (‘Class warfare’, 1 August) lays bare the baleful consequences – intended and unintended – of Labour’s vandalistic attack on private schools. It borders on the insane for a government to seek to destroy a sector which is a world leader. An administration genuinely committed to economic growth would champion industries where the country retains comparative advantage. Consumed by an outmoded class ideology, and seemingly unconcerned about the effects of its policies on the educational prospects for many young people, Labour seems determined to do the opposite.

You might remember that I mentioned His Excellency Mansoor Abulhoul, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the UK, a couple of weeks ago. I was so blown away by his assessment of horse racing in this country, and the potential it has to build lucrative and cultural relationships around the world, that I gallivanted up to London to drop in on him at the UAE embassy. I was in bad shape. Prior to my visit, I had a gazillion red blood cells injected into a torn tendon in my elbow. OMG. I’ve never been stabbed but I think I now have a pretty good idea what it must feel like. The slightest movement was sending excruciating pains up my arm, causing me to screw my face up and make noises like ‘yaieeeee’.

There was always something of John Cleese’s Sir Lancelot about Ben Stokes, ever eager for a flamboyant rescue mission in his own particular, as Lancelot puts it, idiom. Leave no chandelier unswung, no buckle unswashed. He would charge in, gung-holier than thou, and work out the damage later. ‘When I’m in this idiom, I sort of get carried away,’ Lancelot apologises after massacring all the guests at a wedding.  At times, it was glorious. But often, increasingly so in the second half of his England captaincy, ghastly. ‘Incredible highs and pretty low lows’ was Stokes’s own assessment – and we will always be grateful for the highs. But as England rebuild, they need to consider the manner of those lows and how many were self-inflicted.

Whisper it if you must, but it looks as if Gianni (‘Today I feel gay…’) Infantino might have got it right with Fifa’s jumbo-busting World Cup, all 48 teams, 104 games and 39 days of it. Just look at some of the results: forget the Norwegians ‘Viking row’, Messi’s relentless brilliance, magnificent Mbappé, even wise Emma Hayes and her kitchen chalkboard. Look at tiny Cape Verde. With a population of 530,000, about the size of Bristol, it’s one-fifth the size of Jamaica, half that of Mauritius and one-third less than Gran Canaria. But they have been handling football’s aristocrats with the fervour of a French revolutionary execution party.

Cricketers Have Beer, Shock: well, who knew! This wretched incident in some joint in Chelsea involving Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson in a dust-up with some extremely large young Saracens rugby players is hardly world war three, but its ramifications are sending shudders through the cricket establishment. At the time of writing the full details are not entirely clear, though it seems that an England Cricket Board (ECB) security guard might have been accidentally thumped before a full-blown ruckus ensued. Nothing good ever happens after midnight – a sentiment readers will doubtless be familiar with Whether a well-known and widely admired 35-year-old international sportsman should have been out in a nightclub in the early hours of Monday morning is for others to judge.